Jill (31 page)

“Man alive!” Christopher exclaimed. “You don’t think I care that much, do you? I’ll be sick of this place by the summer, I’ll be glad to leave. Your trouble is,” he said, pointing to Patrick, “you’re as windy as hell yourself.”

“Urcher,” said Patrick, in a bad-tempered voice.

“Well, we can’t have it Saturday, we’ll all be gone,” said Eddy. “And I think Wednesday’s a bit soon, don’t you? Make it Thursday night.”

“But——”

“Oh, sod your bloody essay!” shouted Christopher. “As if you don’t know enough to walk through a tute blindfold! … Tell your tutor you’ve got pneumonia.”

“Or pox,” chuckled Eddy. “Ha, ha, ha!”

John left them at this point to have a bath. It was nice to be back. On Monday morning he had a letter from his parents at Preston describing the air-raid they had endured. It was not vivid enough to move him, but he was perturbed to hear that his mother was still suffering from nervous shock. He slipped the letter back into his pocket and forgot it in three minutes.

While he was having coffee that morning (a thing he did automatically now, without reference to its original cause) he saw Elizabeth at a different table with some girl friends, and he watched her with amusement, the way she talked and the way she listened, as if she were part of a comedy he was privileged to watch. Indirectly she reminded him of Jill, whom he did not expect to see again. When they all rose to go, she came swiftly across to his table. “
John!
” she exclaimed, “
do
tell me … I’ve been
so
worried.… Are your family safe? Were they in that dreadful raid?”

Her face hung before him, ludicrously, like an advertisement for cosmetics. There was a piece of fluff on her left shoulder.

“Yes,” he said. “They were. But they were lucky.” He sat back.

“Oh, good.” She looked relieved. “I’m
so
glad. It must have been terrible.”

“It was pretty bad, I think.”

“And there’s another thing.…” She looked at him acutely, then frowned slightly into the distance. “I hope you aren’t too
offended about … the other day, you know. I must have seemed a bit rude. Do tell me, was I?”

“Rude?” John laughed, frankly trying to remember. “Well, a bit, perhaps. But not very, considering.”

“I’m sure I was.… Well, I do want to apologize. I didn’t mean to be nasty. It’s only that Gillian …” She paused, expecting him to cover up her uncompleted sentence, but he only smiled at her. “Well, it’s only that she’s so young. She’s only fifteen, you know.”

“Fifteen? Really!” John was bland. “Is that all?”

“Yes, only fifteen.… And she didn’t really want to—you know—she asked me to—well, you see how it was,” she concluded lamely.

“I see,” said John. “That’s quite all right.”

“Are you sure? Well, so long as you aren’t nursing a grievance or anything.” She looked into his eyes with a brilliant smile.

“No, that’s quite all right. I understand.”

“Good. I must fly now. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” he said, yawning. “Bitch,” he added to himself, stirring his coffee, wondering what had prompted her to feint this submission, and tell all these lies. He wondered, too, if that had been the epitaph on Jill: in the circumstances, it seemed likely, and as he smoked and sipped his coffee he surveyed the experience with a surprising lack of shame.

It was December: the many trees were quite leafless: the views which in summer had been reproduced on postcards were now forsaken and austere. The boats had long been slung up in the boathouses: in the Common Rooms the Christmas numbers of magazines began to appear. And the term was coming to an end. He made an effort to clear up some of the work he had left undone.

Fortunately, he was working just before lunch on Thursday when there was a tap at the door and a yellow face under a soft brown hat peered in. “Hard at it?” inquired an ironical voice.

John jumped up. “Why, come in, sir. What are you—come in and sit down.”

He took Mr. Crouch’s outstretched hand. The master shut the door and put his hat on the table, coming round on to the hearthrug. He wore a thick brown overcoat with the collar turned up.

“This is a nice room you have. A pity you have to share it.”

“Yes, it is a nice room.” John looked round it vaguely.

“A great pity. I always found it essential to have a room to myself, however small. But perhaps you’re different. Cigarette?’

He held out his case, amused when the boy unconsciously took one. As far as John was concerned, Mr. Crouch looked unexpectedly young and it seemed natural for him to be there.

“Surely you haven’t broken up already?”

“Broken up? We’ve
been
broken up. I suppose you’ve been too secluded in your academic fastness to know that we had a little raid last week.”

“Did they hit the school?” John exclaimed.

“Fair and square. Almost completely burnt out, except for the labs and the gym and one or two of the new classrooms. So we are prematurely disbanded.” He blew out smoke. “I don’t think there was much up your way.”

“No, I was there on Friday—nothing, no damage.”

“You were, were you? Pity I didn’t know. You could have looked me up. Did you know I was married now?”

“Why, no—well, many congratulations,” said John, with a return to his old shyness and a movement of his hand.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Crouch lightly. “Thank you very much indeed.” He looked at the boy a moment with a smile.

“Then where are you living now, sir?”

They discussed Huddlesford for a while, Mr. Crouch standing with his back to the fire and John straddling the arms of the sofa. “Still, for all that, I’m not as comfortable as you,” he said, his eye travelling over the room. “You’ve done very nicely for yourself. Not that you haven’t earned it. Why didn’t you write to me?” He grinned in his old manner, seeing the boy confused.

“Well, I started to, several times.…”

Mr. Crouch lifted a yellow hand.

“I know how it is: you needn’t bother to explain.” He inspected the cigarette he held. “I know what one’s first university
term is like. One feels one’s never lived before.” John looked at the carpet. “It’s been worth it, hasn’t it? Worth all that grind?”

“Oh, yes,” said the boy shyly.

“Good. Now will you come and have lunch with me? I don’t know where the best place is.”

John put some coal on the fire, and they went out to a restaurant he had heard Christopher talk about. Mr. Crouch looked about him with interest as they walked through the streets. The chance sights he saw troubled him—an art student in a red skirt sketching some vaulting, a flower-seller and a white-coated kitchen boy carrying a tray of covered plates to a don’s room. These things expressed a life he had not shared, and which he now never would share. He knew the boy at his side would not have noticed them.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing,” he asked, when they were settled at their table, his nicotine-stained fingers locked before him.

John, recounting the work and lectures of the term, at first unconsciously and then consciously tried to make it sound more impressive than it was. “Have you read my tutor’s last book?” he inquired. “It’s very good. He’s the authority on eleventh-century England. I’ve been reading a lot of his papers. I’m lucky to be under him.

“It’s a pity he can’t take you alone,” said Mr. Crouch, breaking his roll. “Have you ever thought of asking him? Of course, the war’s mucked everything up.”

John did not reply, and presently Mr. Crouch asked what else he had done, apart from working. The answers he received were not definite. John did not seem to have joined any societies or made any friends, and to be turning the conversation different ways in order to avoid admitting this. Mr. Crouch studied his face across the artificial flowers. After a time he said:

“Of course, I expect you’re only just beginning to find your feet here. It’s a slow business.” He lit a cigarette in a preoccupied manner. “But if I might be so bold as to give you a bit of advice—and it may be the last bit for some time, if not for
always—I would advise you to get out of the idea that the only thing that matters here is work.”

John nodded vaguely.

“That isn’t so at all. A very tiny percentage—very tiny—of the people up at the moment will become dons of one kind or another. But unless you’re thinking of that—and if you are, remember the competition is very keen, because they’re very, very plush-lined jobs—you must look at your time here from the point of view of what is going to happen to you when you leave.” He settled himself more comfortably in his chair. “You can look at this place as a big railway terminus. Thousands of people. Trains starting in every direction. What you’ve got to decide is, where are
you
going? And having decided, get in with your fellow passengers. They’ll be useful to you. I dare say it sounds a very well-worn piece of cynicism to you when I say you can get a better job for ten minutes’ social climbing than from ten years’ hard work.”

John shrugged his shoulders.

“Unfortunately that is how things are. What you must remember is that in normal times you find here a couple of thousand of the people who are going to be at the top of things in twenty years’ time—or perhaps less. You are privileged to knock about with them while you’re up here on more or less the same social footing—make the most of it. The more contacts you can get, the better. That’s why I should advise you to join plenty of clubs, societies and what-not, even if you despise them or feel out of it there. You can’t afford to despise them—and you can’t afford to go through life feeling out of it. For better or for worse, you’re in the swim now, for three years. Whether or not you stay in the swim depends entirely on how far you take your chances up here.”

John nodded again. “Yes,” he said. “I see what you mean.”

“So don’t become too much of a cloistered monk,” said Mr. Crouch, as they rose to go. “It doesn’t pay. And talking of paying …” He leered round for the waiter.

He believed he had given the boy helpful advice.

When they were outside, John said:

“But what will happen to the school now?”

“The school?” Mr. Crouch held his gloves in his right hand and smacked them against his left. “That I can’t say. In any case, I was leaving at Christmas.”

“Were you really, sir? Why?”

“I am going to join the Royal Air Force in some capacity or other.” Mr. Crouch’s face split into a smile at John’s incredulous look, and his utterance grew more precise and formal. “I had pretty well decided, and this business has made it certain.”

“Will they take you?”

“Perhaps not in any very lethal arm of the service. I may be able to get into the educational side of things. Does it seem so very surprising to you?”

“Well, yes, sir, it does rather.”

“I don’t think it is.” Mr. Crouch shuffled quickly along, glancing through the gates of the various colleges they passed, nearly treading on a cat. “A record of war service will be very useful in gaining employment when peace is declared, and it will look better to have volunteered than to have been called up.”

John had grown depressed when they parted about the middle of the afternoon. He walked back to his rooms in a bitter mood. There was a cold humidity in the air: the streets were wet though no rain had fallen that day. He felt that he had failed to conceal the fact from Mr. Crouch that he was making a mess of things, that he had broken the bargain that they had tacitly contracted. The advice (which Mr. Crouch had stressed on parting) seemed reasonable and well meant, but by some strange impotence of his own it was rendered entirely irrelevant. Everything seemed wrong.

He boiled the kettle and made himself some tea. Any self-reproaching or self-promises were out of the question now: he had fought himself to a standstill.

After doing the black-out, he went on no particular impulse of friendliness up to Whitbread’s room. It was empty and the fire had not been lit. John remembered seeing Whitbread at breakfast wearing, the academic dress necessary for taking an examination. One of the question papers lay on the table: John glanced through it. It was meaningless to him. The realization
that Whitbread was taking an examination when his own tutor apparently thought so little of him that the matter had not even been mentioned made him peculiarly angry. He opened the cupboard door, and, taking out the jam pot, put a large spoonful of jam on each of the open books lying on the desk. Then he snapped them shut. The rest of the jam he ladled on to the back of the fire, scraping out the pot thoroughly and licking the spoon. There was a nearly new pat of butter in the cupboard, too, and this he unwrapped from its paper and cut in half, putting each half into the toes of Whitbread’s slippers. Then he filled the pockets of the jackets hanging in the bedroom with sugar and tea. In one of them there was a pound note with a slip of paper bearing its number pinned to it, and he put that in his own pocket book. As an afterthought, he poured Whitbread’s milk into the coal scuttle and lit the fire.

A great cheerfulness came over him now and he sauntered out through the cloisters into the dark. There was a letter from his parents in the Lodge, but he did not even trouble to pick it up. When six o’clock struck, he went to the nearest public house and sat alone in the bar, the first customer of the evening. The landlady polished a glass or two behind the counter, humming a tune, then went into the back room. John drank steadily. The beer tasted so unpleasant that he asked a little timidly for whisky, and sipped it undiluted. This made him thirsty and his next order was for beer to cool his throat: not till after several swallows did he notice that he could no longer taste it. On this condition it seemed quite nice, and he drank it swiftly. Then he bought a packet of cigarettes and smoked, lighting one from the other.

He wondered in what exact spot at that exact time Jill was. He had not seen her at all since returning from Huddlesford, though he gathered that she was back in Oxford. The thought was at first quite theoretical and evoked nothing. He lingered over her memory, remembering her as a false light he had stopped following through strength of will. How right he had been. Then he began to reconstruct her face, as one might restring a set of beads together, until it rose in his mind like an
apparition over a cauldron. He ordered more to drink. The clock ticked cheerfully, the bar filled up with men talking in low, serious voices, and all the struggle in him had sunk down out of sight. He stared at the fire and at the mirror and at his own glass.